The Anthropocene Is a Motherfucker

Critical Anthropocene analyses, including those naming the era the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene, neglect to analyze the gendered-sexual domination, or rapism, that founds the era. The origins of the Anthropocene extend back some seven thousand years to the establishment of patriarchal systems, based in ruling men establishing control over women’s sexual and reproductive powers. That model of domination then extended into the enslavement of others, ownership of land, and establishment of social hierarchies. These patterns mark the founding of the United States through the European rapist genocide of Indigenous peoples and theft of land, as well as the rapism at the core of chattel slavery. These enactments of motherfucking enabled a world-wide cotton industry, which in turn made possible the global and rapacious capitalist system that is most responsible for the Anthropocene. Gendered sex and violence infuse ecocidal activities, past and present, including plowing, drilling, nuking, and fracking—which all double as slang terms for fucking.

The Gods We Worship

Anthropocene Man worships himself via a creed of human exceptionalism and idolization of “tower of power” gods—speed, profit, domination, and accumulation. Anthropocene Man proclaims that he is becoming god—able to engineer a new genesis to replace nature, yielding a fully controlled manmade world. The divine role model for this project is the heaven-based and reportedly immortal, omnipotent, and purely male father god. Man’s self-deification is contingent upon deicide—simultaneously ecocide and matricide—of the original earth deity Mother Nature-Earth. Western ways of thinking reduce Mother Nature-Earth to mere metaphor, but this is wrong. Environmental justice theorists and activists worldwide speak to the reality of Mother Nature-Earth and call for the defense of the planetary Mother, including through the legal establishment of Mother Earth Rights.

Call (On) Your “Mutha’ ”

Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.

Color Mother Nature Gone

Color is a living presence and natural symbol, experienced through the heart as well as the eyes. In the Anthropocene, a pervasive colorlessness reveals the diminishment and departure of the life force-source, which manifests in the glorification of whiteness signifying White supremacy as well as in the proliferation of artificial color signifying Man’s goal of copying and replacing of nature. Whiteness as the hallmark of modernity and the conquest of nature marked two industrial-age world fairs, one in Chicago and the other in Rio de Janeiro. The ecocidal drive to eliminate and replace nature is epitomized by the production of plastics and the accompanying synthetic rainbow of man-made color. The keystone symbol for the Anthropocene is the mechanical bride, or white-face fembot, meant to signify man’s defeat of nature, but actually a Sterility Goddess, signposting an apocalyptic departure of Mother Nature-Earth.

“Word Is Born”

The African concept of Nommo understands language to be the force of life, allowing speakers to participate in bringing something into existence, albeit with care. Words are alive, inspired, filled with breath or spirit, and hence able to move and change speakers and listeners. Ecological living requires what Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as “grammars of animacy,” which recognize and respect the being of all life and allow relationships with other-than-human beings. Creativity is a mothering power, which cannot be understood as purely female or biological. Mothering for social justice characterizes those who create community, who love and help, who decide, who act. Man’s motherfucking is countered with cuntspeak, telling the truth, laying down the law of respect, and conjuring other worlds. While the motherfucker claims omnipotence, power over all, the “Mutha’ ” evokes cunctipotence, the conjoined power of all.

The Dirty/Earthy Mother

This chapter explores the ways that undoing the Anthropocene means rejecting misogynist and biophobic meanings of Mother Nature-Earth and reclaiming much of what has been made obscene and “dirty.” This includes reclaiming the word cunt and cultivating a “dirty mind,” able to see through oppressive hierarchical dualisms. The Anthropocene manifests Man’s attempted mutilation and rape-murder of Earth. It relies on a fusion of sex and violence as well as an invidious dualism that falsely opposes nature and culture, soil and spirit, dirty and clean, black and white, earth and sky, female and male. Refusing this artificial opposition, Nature-Earth appears as the active and autonomous “Mutha’,” one who thinks, who decides, who gives, who takes, who comes, and who also can go. Human beings have long invoked Nature-Earth as “Mother,” not only to recognize our dependence on and connection to Nature-Earth, but also, perhaps, to remind Nature-Earth of their relationship to us.

Introduction

This book turns on the word motherfucker, springing from the genius of what Geneva Smitherman calls “Black Talk” and bearing a seemingly infinite range of variations and meanings. The Man in the proposed new geological age, the Anthropocene (“Age of Man” or “Age of Humans”), is the motherfucker in the word’s worst sense, while perennial Mother Nature-Earth epitomizes the word’s best sense—the “Mutha’,” the indomitable and inexhaustible force-source of continuous being, transformation, and renewal. The word motherfucker holds powers of invocation, curse, swear, prayer, and convocation. These powers structure this book.

What’s Going On?

Mother Nature-Earth is probably humanity’s oldest religious, philosophical, and scientific idea, recognizing a non-binary mothering power, the encompassing womb that both gives and takes life through a process of continuing rebirth and renewal. Western culture reduces Mother Nature-Earth to a folkloric figure, but cognitive justice challenges the assumed supremacy and centrality of Eurocentric and male-dominated theory mostly associated with father figures. The Anthropocene is not only a geological event but also a political, philosophical, and theological one. Key to its undoing is decolonization, including of lands, waters, minds, and spirit, by drawing upon unjustly discredited knowledges, including Indigenous ontological conceptions of spiritual meanings that recognize the awareness and being of all terrestrial life, the inherent value of matter and the agency of Nature-Earth.

Coda

This coda is inspired by a dream in which an elemental being advises that those of us seeking to make life in the face of ecological, political, and spiritual disaster “gather and vote.” Voting goes beyond casting a ballot at the polls as it derives from the same root as devotion and convocation. Undoing the Anthropocene requires devotion to the Earth “Mutha’ ” as well as recognition that life is a convocation, a coming together of all participating in the continuous process of making life. This is perhaps the most needful of knowledges in the Anthropocene. This knowing cannot be abstract but must be felt with the heart and put into practice—individual, communal, ritual. Consider it, then, our most profound civic birthright and responsibility to recognize the larger earth-community of which we are a part and to gather and vote, in the sense of invoking and expressing devotion, for Mother Nature-Earth.

“Feed the Green”

This dream-inspired chapter seeks the spiritual meanings of green, the color announcing the living presence of nature. Multitudinous green beings appear in sacred, artistic, and popular traditions, and are all emblematic of Mother Nature-Earth. Familiar greenness signifies the continuous renewal of the energetic patterns that sustain life as we know it, patterns that must be fed or else they dissipate. A new strain of symbolic mutagenic green signposts the Man-made insults that result in the disruption of those ecological patterns. Humans, who have not been so doing, need to feed the green and practice ritual renewal of the patterns that sustain us, though all aspects of lifestyle, work, arts, and ceremony, both private and public.